The Voice

In September 2015, Munich’s central train station came to international media attention as a site of arrival for thousands of refugees. After an exhausting and often dangerous journey, this was their first step into Germany. But what happens after the welcome? Younus, Shadi and Eyob tell their stories of arriving: three voices against the ongoing problematization of migration.

Academic research seems to be neo-liberally recycled from one conference to the next, or from one publication to the other, just to produce X papers per year. But how many times can one be innovative, original, and radical over the course of a career? A story about finding (and possibly losing) a true love: anthropology.

“Many people have died, some people fainted, we ran out of water and we ran out of food. Also we ran out of petrol. We ran out of everything, we were hopeless in the sea, the wind was just taking us from one point to the other.” This story of Sunday, a refugee from Nigeria, is one of the many ones I’ve heard while working in Malta—an island swallowing human lives in the name of immigration controls.

“Many people have died, some people fainted, we ran out of water and we ran out of food. Also we ran out of petrol. We ran out of everything, we were hopeless in the sea, the wind was just taking us from one point to the other.” This story of Sunday, a refugee from Nigeria, is one of the many ones I’ve heard while working in Malta—an island swallowing human lives in the name of immigration controls.

After the instauration of the communist regime in Romania, political activists, priests and intellectuals were imprisoned as “enemies of the people” . Here is the testimony of one of these “enemies” – the 90 year-old priest and former political prisoner Nicholas Bordașiu. Remembering the period of his detention, Bordașiu talks about everyday resistance behind bars in the face of brutal oppression and how to form a community of culture and spirituality against forced “re-education”.

The war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip has come to a preliminary end with the announcement of an open-ended ceasefire. But the recent months of violence have cast a dark shadow on those who advocate peace and reconciliation, which is why we asked one Israeli, and one Palestinian peace-activist the same question: How has the recent flare-up in violence influenced your ability as a movement to promote peace and non-violence?